A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:40:35 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:40:35] S0: Thi this is one, I'm actually just selfishly interested, what was the process like of Li of writing Lost and Founder? Like how much was it harder than you thought? It'd be easier to take you a long time and just everything around publishing a book, I mean, it's so different than, than starting a company weren't just wondering what that process was like. Yeah, [00:40:51] S1: Yeah. Um, so I did, I did, I wrote a couple other books, but they were like SEO manuals, you know, educational stuff for like O'Reilly and Wiley , which are very different than writing for the Big five publishers. So Penguin Random House , uh, ended up , uh, buying Lost and Founder, which was very exciting and the Advance was great and all that kinda stuff. But the process itself was essentially I pitched , uh, publishers in New York with an outline classic. Like if you imagine what the 1970s Woody Allen movie where you go go to New York and like, talk to all these publishers and sit around a desk with people. It's not, not that dissimilar from that. Wow . Um , and then my agent ran an auction , uh, for the book. And Penguin Random House did a, did a preempt, which means that they said, we don't want you shopping it around. We , we want you to just sign with us right away. And we liked the offer. So we did that. I loved working with my editor. [00:41:42] S0: Was that a function of just the interest in the book, or did you also have, 'cause you have obviously like a big following on, on Twitter, LinkedIn, like how much was it, you know, those two things I'm sure played in, but it was a
00:41:42 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:41:42] S0: Was that a function of just the interest in the book, or did you also have, 'cause you have obviously like a big following on, on Twitter, LinkedIn, like how much was it, you know, those two things I'm sure played in, but it was a [00:41:53] S1: Second one . I would say they played in more than the book. Okay. And unfortunately for a lot of authors right now , uh, in nonfiction in particular, fiction is a little different fiction there . It's a little more speculative, take a chance, hits driven , whatever. But nonfiction is very much how big is your audience? Um, Geraldine and I like to joke that before, before she went and pitched her book, I should have just bought her a hundred thousand more Twitter followers. <laugh> , right? Because yeah , you know, Elon lets fake followers flourish. So like why not just, why not just buy? [00:42:22] S0: Yeah , yeah . It's
00:42:22 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:42:22] S0: Yeah , yeah . It's [00:42:22] S1: Good . A bunch of fake accounts and then you look great to the publisher. So if anyone's listening and they're an author, I'd be like, yeah, just go on Fiverr and maybe bump up your social media numbers. Like it's kind of sketch and they'll, you'll probably lose 'em over the next few months. But it's helpful for those conversations. <laugh> smart . Um , and they're not, you know, they're not su super sophisticated about how they look at it, but , uh, I was gonna say, the process itself of writing was very familiar to me. 'cause I've been blogging for, you know, decades now, but the , uh, the intensity was pretty high. So it was like a lot of writing. We, I wrote the first six , six chapters of the initial version of Lost and Founder submitted them to my editor at Penguin, and she was like, this is not the right book. We gotta throw this out and start over. Wow. And I remember being extremely frustrated that we couldn't have identified that from the outline and, you know, that I had done all this work, but we ended up making what I think was a was a much better [00:43:14] S0: Oh, it was a great, yeah, it was a great book. Did you do it full time for that period or were , is it kind of on the side?
00:43:14 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:43:14] S0: Oh, it was a great, yeah, it was a great book. Did you do it full time for that period or were , is it kind of on the side? [00:43:19] S1: It was on the side. It was kind of in lieu of blogging. If you look at that year of my blog posts on Moz, essentially I was still filming the video series, which, which was like an hour every week or whatever, but the blog posts kind of trickled to nothing. And I did almost all my publishing or all my writing for the book. [00:43:41] S0: And then let me ask this other question, which I don't know if you'll have ready my hand answers for, but one thing I've noticed in general for from repeat founders and , and I had this myself, is you go through it, you know, very little, you take all these punches to the face and at some point during that you're like, wow, if I was restarting right now, like, it would be so much easier, right? Because I would know this, I would know that, whatever. And , uh, obviously there was a lot of lessons like in your book and some of it that is true. Like there's always parts that are easier. I guess the question is like, which parts were you wrong on? Like, which parts were surprising? Where you were like, wow, I really thought this was gonna be easier. And it actually turns out it's almost just hard . [00:44:17] S1: Uh, do you mean for SparkToro after I'd learned the lessons at Moz? Correct. [00:44:21] S0: Yeah.
00:44:21 · Pablo Srugo, Rand Fishkin
[00:44:21] S0: Yeah. [00:44:22] S1: I think product building and product market fit or, or Hmm . I , I don't even believe that there is like one product market fit. I think think it's more of a scale, right? You are a better or worse fit than definitely [00:44:34] S0: Spectrum. I would agree.
00:44:35 · Rand Fishkin
[00:44:35] S1: Yeah. Spectrum, right? And so improving along that spectrum , uh, I think is not made easier by doing it multiple times <laugh> . And that's very frustrating. Um, and part of that I think could be , can be luck, right? It's kind of , I think Moz was a very lucky bet, like we hit, we hit a market at a time where there was tremendous need and nobody else liked that market. And everybody in 2006 thought SEO was spam and they kept believing that for another 10 years. And it, you know, it took forever for sort of a, a mature community of people to think that SEO was a real practice to think that Google was gonna become the behemoth that it became. Um, and so we had a huge advantage there. Um, and we knew our audience kind of better than other people did with SparkToro . I think it's, it's been a challenge in that the thing that we help people do, audience research is not a thing people are assigned to do very often, like most companies don't do, don't try and figure out, oh, which podcasts do , does do my customers listen to, and what videos they watch on YouTube and which channels they subscribe to, what subreddits are they on and which, which sources of media do they consume? What email newsletters are they subscribing to? All that kinda stuff. I think that's crucial. I think that is absolutely amazing. I think most marketers I talk to are like, oh , that would be so useful to know, but it's not part of their job description and it's not part of their tactical day-to-Day work. And so getting people to like adopt it as a practice has been really hard. Um, and then I think with Snack Bar , is the game gonna be fun? Is it gonna be deeply fun and addictive and enjoyable to play and rewarding? And that is gonna be a huge challenge. And I think, you know, I have no experience in that field, so I am taking a , a huge gamble. And I think the only thing that I've gotten much better at is I think I'm much better at I identifying and recruiting extraordinary talent who can do those things, right? So like, I, I think our game designer who has a, you know, history of like just dance and the squad and, and Assassin's Creed, he was the lead game designer for Assassin's Creed and a bunch of other , you know, a bunch of other games. I'm like, this guy can do that. I, I believe in you. I know you can do it.